That's correct. Although, logging out and back in works better in my experience (I'm using Unity as my main desktop environment at this point)
–
jrg♦Mar 24 '11 at 14:15

8

A good way to do it in a terminal, in case you want to see debug messages, is setsid unity. You can close the terminal when ever you like, but you'll still get the terminal output made by Unity.
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Stefano Palazzo♦Mar 24 '11 at 19:45

1

If you want to run that in terminal without breaking it when you exit terminal, type: 'unity --replace &'
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Rafał CieślakApr 27 '11 at 17:41

2

Just using unity will work as it is the identical command.
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CasMay 11 '11 at 16:20

using unity --replace have a tiny catch, you have to launch the menu once then only the left bar will auto-hide after restarted
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d4v1dv00May 25 '11 at 13:49

I found killall -u USR1 -r -g unity* (optionally, with -i for interactive) to be more effective than @Andrew's answer. My only problem with this vs unity --replace is that it will kill your session which unity --replace doesn't do. So, reserve this for when it is severely broken.